This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

A popular subject in sociology and cultural studies, divorce has been overlooked by literary critics. Spanning nearly a century during which the divorce rate skyrocketed, this study traces the treatment of divorce in the American novel.

According to Glenda Riley, “the historical conflict between anti-divorce and pro-divorce factions has prevented the development of effective, beneficial divorce laws, procedures, and policies. Today we still lack processes that move spouses out of unworkable marriages in a constructive fashion and get them back into the mainstream of life in a stable, productive condition.” Her pioneering historical overview offers proposals for dealing with a subject that now pertains to nearly half of all marriages.

“The rediscovery of Thomas Detter’s Nellie Brown, or The Jealous Wife, with Other Sketches, published in 1871, could be to contemporary American Studies what the discovery of gold was to the development of the American West.”—from the introduction by Frances Smith Foster. This collection includes a novella, two short stories, and six essays. The title story, the first novel written by an African American in the West, takes place in Virginia and addresses adultery and divorce, subjects considered radical and risqué at that time. Equally provocative are the “Other Sketches.” These include two short stories: “The Octoroon Slave of Cuba,” an alternative to “tragic mulatto” fiction, and “Uncle Joe,” an African-American folktale. The six personal essays, including “My Trip to Baltimore” and “Give the Negro a Chance,” are as compelling now as they were then in depicting the West after Reconstruction.

Inspired by the current public fascination with single women, Single Lives traces the relationship between modern and contemporary representations of single women. The original essays collected here analyze a broad range of texts that examine the ways films, cookbooks, archives, popular literature, and other British and American texts express norms, ideals, and challenges for single women and their relationship to dominant ideals of marriage and the family. This volume looks backwards to constellate existing scholarship, constituent fields, and unrecognized single voices and forward to consider new methods for interdisciplinary singles studies.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in `1997.

This book examines six Progressive Age novels of marital discord which specifically focus upon narratives of divorced and divorcing women within the context of their multivalent social and economic value on the "Marriage market."

Largely ignored in American literary history, the magazine novel was extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, with editors describing the form as a virtual "necessity" for magazines. Unlike many previous studies of periodicals that focus often exclusively on elite literary magazines, Social Stories treats a variety of magazines and authors, ranging from Ann Stephens's novels in fashionable magazines for women to William Dean Howells's anxious investigation of modern mass culture in A Modern Instance. William Gilmore Simms's pro-Southern antebellum novels, the publication of Martin Delany's Blake in an African American magazine, Jeremy Belknap's investigation of the racial and national politics of the early national period, and Rebecca Harding Davis's efforts to make sense of race during Reconstruction all receive Patricia Okker's careful attention. By exploring how magazine novelists addressed audiences that differed from one another in terms of race, region, class, and gender, Social Stories offers a narrative of the American magazine novel that emphasizes its direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of its day. Rejecting the association of novel reading with notions of the private, Okker convincingly argues that nineteenth-century magazine novels were indeed fiercely social. Created collaboratively with readers, editors, and authors, and read among a community of readers and other texts, the serial novel of the 1800s proved to be an ideal form for exploring the strategies Americans used and the obstacles they faced in forming and sustaining a collective sense of themselves. They are, in short, novels that tell stories about how--and whether--individuals can come together to form a society. Patricia Okker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the author of Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors.

Family and Divorce in California succeeds in reconstructing the private world of farmers, laborers, small-town merchants tradesmen, and housewives through an examination of local newspapers, census data, legal documents, and, above all, divorce records during the years 1850 to 1890. Some 400 divorce cases from two rural counties form the core of the study. Here we see how the compassionate ideal, the cult of true womanhood, and the work ethic actually affected the attitudes and behavior of working-class and rural as well as urban, middle-class people. A wide variety of topics is covered: basic family values women's health, work, sexuality, character, and indepdence men's work, sexual conduct, and affective retions the nature of parenthood, childhood, and marital companionship domestic violenc The book also explores the early years of the divorce crisis that began in the 1880s and answers the questions of how and why it developed.